The present invention relates to a pill dispenser and especially to a pill dispenser for dispensing predetermined pills in pill containers in sequential order and signaling the patient of the appropriate time for taking the next dosage of medicine.
Frequently, when an individual is taking medication he or she must take the medication at spaced intervals over some extended period of time. Typical of such users are the chronically ill who take medication to control their illness and ease their pain, women who take birth control pills, and the elderly who must take dietary or hormonal supplements. Many of these users continue to use single compartment pill containers of the type which are typically provided by a druggist and in which no provision is made for the orderly dispensing of the medication on a schedule over an extended period. Other users, because they must take a variety of medications, prefer segmented containers, such as the type found in U.S. Pat. No. 1,896,976, which segregates the different types of medication but is not adapted to hold the medication in an ordered arrangement to be sequentially dispensed in accordance with a preset medication schedule. If the individual must take more than one kind of medication or if the dosage level or type of medication prescribed varies according to the time it should be taken, or if the spaced intervals between administration of the medication are somewhat irregular, the individual may have difficulty in remembering and determining which medication to take at what time, and may even, on occasion, forget to take the medication required and thereafter be unable to ascertain which, or even whether, any medication has been missed.
A number of attempts have been made to develop dispensers for use in sequentially dispensing medicaments in pill or tablet form that will conveniently allow the user to quickly determine when the last pill or tablet was dispensed and when the next pill or tablet should be taken. All, including such devices as are found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,921,806, 3,261,455, and 2,953,242, have suffered from various shortcomings, such as requiring a large number of separate pill compartments thereby increasing the surface area of the container and thus making the container inconvenient to store; requiring intricate and cumbersome means of accessing and dispensing a compartmented pill or tablet and thereby increasing the complexity of the device and requiring added parts or requiring elaborate means to move the pills or tablets around in the container thereby increasing the likelihood that the pills will be broken and damaging the pills and jamming the pill movement system. Failing to sequentially order pills within a compartment may result in an inability to ensure that a single, proper pill will be dispensed therefrom when the compartment is next accessed or failing to provide a user recognizable pill-time correspondence may thereby result in an inability of the user to easily determine if or when a pill was last taken. Failing to provide any way in which the user can quickly and easily refill the dispenser for reuse may result in uneconomical one time usage by an individual with the attendant increased cost thereof. Most of the known pill dispensers suffer one or more of these disadvantages. The present invention overcomes these and other disadvantages and at the same time allows the user to quickly determine when the last pill or tablet was dispensed, when the next pill or tablet should be taken, and which of the pills in the container should next be dispensed, and it does so by a container having fewer parts, less complexity, and at a lower cost.
Prior art pill dispensers of this type may be seen in the Rossmo U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,083,452 and 4,334,617, each of which has containers for medication along with a locking device for rotating the dispensing position from a day-to-day position for dispensing pills and having an interlock so that each day's pills are dispensed as the device is rotated. In the Carlson U.S. Pat. No. 4,223,801, an automatic periodic drug dispensing system operates in connection with a timing circuit for alerting patient's when medication and specific drugs are to be taken. In the Rappaport et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,807,757, a pill dispenser dispenses on a day-to-day basis from a magazine of stacked arrays of medication by day and week which releases the medication through a funnel shaped end portion. The Sunnen U.S. Pat. No. 4,127,190 shows a dispenser for dispensing pills or tablets in a predetermined order in which a stacked array is marked by day and which can be rotated from day to day for dispensing individual medications. The Robbins U.S. Pat. No. 3,678,884 is a dispensing and recording container rotated on a day-to-day basis.